A rethink about deforestation
Years ago, no one thought twice about felling the rainforest around this village in West Africa.
Land was cleared, cocoa and palm oil were planted, and the hamlet survived. But the wind blows stronger across the fields and scrub these days, and the rainfall is heavier than the elders remember.
"Before, the weather wasn't so hot," says the village chief, Nana Opare Ababio.
Afiaso, with 620 people, is on the border of Ghana's Kakum National Park, about 200 kilometers (120 miles) from Accra, where a 160-nation U.N. conference is discussing how deforestation and conservation fit into a new global treaty on climate change.
An estimated 32 million acres (13 million hectares) of forest are lost to loggers, farmers and fires every year, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. Most of it is in the Amazon, in Southeast Asia and in West Africa.
Trees, and especially the diverse vegetation of tropical rainforests, soak up and store carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. Decaying or burning trees releases carbon into the air. Scientists estimate that deforestation accounts for up to 20 percent of the carbon added by man to the atmosphere.
Climate negotiators have wrestled for years over the complexities of monitoring and accounting for deforestation, but they acknowledge that efforts to contain global warming will fail unless the loss of forests is checked.
Delegates agree that countries should be compensated for slowing or halting deforestation, and that this should be a key element in a new treaty under negotiation to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
In Accra, another group of countries whose forests already have been depleted argued with growing success that they should be rewarded for maintaining their remaining woodlands and for increasing their forest cover.
But delegations _ and even environmentalists _ are split on how those programs should be financed and how they would be overseen. Negotiations on the deforestation package are likely to go through all of next year until the new treaty is due to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009.
Estimates of the costs range from US$20 billion to US$30 billion (euro13.5 billion to euro20 billion) a year flowing to developing countries threatened by the effects of climate change.
"We need a financial mechanism to create incentives for countries to conserve their forests and natural resources," said Duncan Marsh, director of climate policy for The Nature Conservancy, based in Washington. Those countries would have new funds "to give them an alternative to cutting down their forests."
Marsh said the program is different from bilateral aid projects, because payments would be based on the performance of conservation and reforestation.
But it won't work unless local communities share in the planning and benefits, said Emily Brickell, a climate expert for the Worldwide Fund for Nature, or WWF.
"Deforestation is an economic issue," she said. Communities must be persuaded that it pays more to conserve their forests than to uproot them.
Ghana, a West African nation that once had thick tropical forests along its Atlantic Ocean coastline, has lost 90 percent of its forest cover. Hoping to reverse the trend, it enacted a law two years ago to give villagers a share of revenues derived from preserving the forests, whether from non-timber products or tourism.
But it takes time for legal action to trickle down to Afiaso. The village, two kilometers (1 mile) from a wall of towering trees that marks the edge of the park, has no electricity, no sanitation and just one community water well.
"As far as I am concerned, we have not benefited from the forest, apart from employment opportunities for a few of our young men," said Ababio, 47, seated under a tree alongside other village elders, all wearing a ceremonial toga-type robes to greet a small group of reporters.
Ababio said he does not regret cutting down the trees for agriculture, but he is now willing to help replant degraded land. He now hopes to supplement the village's income by starting a tourist guide business into the park and by using micro-credit schemes to launch small businesses.
Clearing the forest was "a clear example of the economic drivers for deforestation," said Brickell. "Who can blame them?"
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